The announcement of the invasion took most German people almost completely by surprise. On many previous occasions, the imminence of war had been obvious in a massive escalation of hostile propaganda pumped out against the prospective enemy by Goebbels’s media machine. But because Hitler had wanted to deceive Stalin into thinking there would be no attack, such propaganda had been entirely absent on this occasion, and indeed in mid-June there were even rumours that Stalin was about to pay a formal visit to the German Reich.
